“So you thought that meant looking through it was okay?” Priti sounds angry but her eyes are moving nervously from my hands to where the phone has landed.

“Was it Ali?” I ask.

She looks away from me—somewhere above my head—clears her throat, and says, “Was what Ali?” Her voice is too controlled, too stoic.

“Was she the one who told everyone?”

“I thought you said it was Flávia. You said she and I were the only ones who knew.”

“I said she and you were the only ones I told.”

“Well, then—”

“Priti.”

She looks up, holding my gaze for only a moment before looking away. “I’m never going to forgive her for it, if it makes you feel better,” she mumbles.

I take a deep breath, trying to process this information. It wasn’t Flávia. It wasn’t Flávia. It wasn’t Flávia.

It was my sister.

“How could you … why would you … tell her? That’s not your right.”

Priti furrows her eyebrows together and leans away from me, like I’ve said something she wasn’t expecting. “How was I supposed to keep that to myself?”

“So you just had to go and give your best friend a piece of gossip about me? Is that what it was?”

Priti scoffs. “Of course not. But … you saw what was happening here. The tension, you being upset, Ammu being upset, Abbu being upset, nobody ever talking about it. It was all driving me insane. I had to talk to someone and it couldn’t be you or them. It’s a taboo subject. I couldn’t just keep it all bottled up inside.”

“You had no right to tell her. And then to lie about it, to pretend it was Flávia—”

“Look, I’m sorry. I know. I was upset and I knew you would be mad and I thought if you could just believe it was Flávia for a little while at least … you wouldn’t be so mad. I thought I could sort it out, get Ali to fix it.”

But her words barely register in my head. All this time I suspected Flávia, and my sister was lying straight to my face. She knew exactly what was going on and she was letting Flávia take the blame for it.

“I can’t believe you hate Flávia that much. That you would let me hate her for nothing.”

Priti frowns. “That’s not …” she shakes her head, her eyes settling into a glare. “You really don’t care about anyone but yourself, do you?”

I blink. “What?”